Editor’s Note: This article is part of Police1’s Training Week, which explores how agencies can improve knowledge retention, prevent skill decay and ensure officers can apply what they’ve learned under pressure. Thanks to our Training Week sponsor, T4E.
Police training often ends with a score, a time or a passing qualification. But those measures do not always reveal whether officers can apply what they learned when conditions become unpredictable, decisions carry consequences and performance matters most.
For Police1 columnist Jason Wuestenberg, a law enforcement consultant and founder of the National Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association, effective training begins with a clear definition of what officers must be able to do in the field. Drawing on his expertise in firearms instruction, Wuestenberg says agencies must create realistic training conditions, establish measurable standards and evaluate whether officers are improving rather than simply requiring everyone to meet the same arbitrary benchmark.
Wuestenberg retired from the Phoenix (Ariz.) Police Department in 2017 after 22 years of service, including 13 years as a full-time firearms and tactics instructor. He retired as a firearms sergeant/rangemaster and has conducted firearms training and instructor development at the state, national and international levels.
Below, Wuestenberg uses firearms training as a practical lens to explain how agencies can build performance-based training, measure improvement and determine whether continued mistakes point to an individual skill deficiency, ineffective instruction or a broader leadership and cultural problem.
Before training, how should an agency define expected field performance?
Agencies need to identify the specific practical tasks, behaviors and skills officers are actually required to perform in real-world, uncontrolled street environments. If an agency expects officers to execute a skill or tactic in the field, it must explicitly allow and train them to perform that skill in the controlled environment of the range. Oftentimes, traditional range safety rules prevent firearms instructors from providing realistic, practical firearms training.
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How can instructors build training objectives around actions, conditions and performance standards?
For the firearms community, I developed a simple formula for creating advanced firearms drills. That formula is taught and practiced in the NLEFIA three-day Advanced Firearms Instructor course.
- Action (basic skills): Select at least three fundamental skills required for the drill (e.g., weapon presentation, empty gun reloads, positional shooting or malfunction clearances).
- Conditions: Incorporate at least two environmental or situational parameters under which the action must occur (e.g., movement, multiple targets, low light, elevated heart rate or operating alongside multiple officers).
- Standard (marksmanship accountability): Establish clear, measurable performance criteria coupled with time (e.g., requiring all hits to land within an 8-inch A-zone, counting line breaks “out,” enforcing Go/No-Go rules for tactical errors or imposing time penalties for misses).
This formula gives firearms instructors a structured framework for designing advanced drills for their in-service training.
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How can agencies measure officer performance before and after training, and what are the limits of those measures?
For firearms, the best tool for showing before-and-after evidence is a shot timer. The first time an officer completes an advanced drill, they will receive a time from the shot timer, plus there may be added time penalties for marksmanship or tactical errors. The instructor provides some coaching, and with each subsequent run through the drill, the goal is to reduce their overall time. By reducing their time, they demonstrate improved efficiency and marksmanship.
The more times they can run through the drill, the better — repetition is king when it comes to training. The biggest mistake many agencies make is that instructors often select an arbitrary time that everyone must meet to successfully complete each drill. But not all officers have the same skill level when they arrive at the range. The instructor’s goal should be to increase everyone’s skills incrementally based on their current skill level, not to get every officer to the same level.
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When most officers succeed but a few struggle, what does that suggest about the training and individual performance?
When only a few officers fail while most succeed, this suggests the overall training methodology and instruction are sound, but the individual officers may be struggling with specific basic mechanics or personal skill deficiencies that require targeted, one-on-one coaching and diagnosis.
When officers repeat the same mistakes after training, how can leaders determine whether the issue is instruction or agency culture?
Leaders can evaluate this by reviewing the training curriculum and questioning the instructors about the validity of the content. Training programs don’t write themselves. They are typically written by the instructors who teach them. Leaders should also observe the instructors to ensure the curriculum is followed and the instructors are providing quality coaching. “Instructor” may be their title or certification, but “coaching” is their function.
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When poor performance stems from resistance or agency culture rather than a skill gap, what should leaders do?
Employee resistance should be handled at the individual employee level. It’s a simple proposition: Conform to standards and expectations or seek employment elsewhere.
When the performance stems from an existing agency culture, leaders must look in the mirror. Agency culture is a top-down framework. If leadership at any level, including instructors, views its firearms program as a liability checkbox by simply conducting qualifications to keep officers on the street, then poor employee performance is inevitable. Leadership needs to change the culture, or the leadership must be replaced.
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